* If I consider "We acquire assets not liabilities" in a bankruptcy court, that could make sense to me, because that is the context in which assets are pooled together to cover the highest priority liabilities while voiding all other liabilities. This clearly isn't the case because the Star Wars assets were not acquired through a bankruptcy court.
* If I consider it as a purchase of assets from another company, then the liabilities stay with the original company. This clearly isn't the case because Lucasfilm no longer exists as an independent company.
* If I consider it as a purchase of assets, followed by the original company declaring bankruptcy, that could result in assets being purchased with liabilities no longer existing. This clearly isn't the case, because Lucasfilm was acquired and merged with Disney, and never itself declared bankruptcy.
I can't come up with any explanation in which Disney's defense makes any bit of sense whatsoever.
The interesting part is Lucas's role in all of this. I want to see the purchase contracts. It might actually say in there that Lucas was supposed to buy out these rights and deliver the assets clean of obligations. If I were advising, I would say sue both Lucas and Disney and let them fight it out amongst themselves.
Maybe it explains Disney declaration of the EU being no longer canon? I am not familiar enough to know where this writer’s content sits. If it’s considered EU, it’s possible that they don’t hold that liability.
It's like a collage of arguments that have stood up in court. Just like their contracts are collages.
Their contribution is the glue. Like glue code, glue sentences. Transition sentences. Stapling pages together.
So there's like a pecking order of lawyers, from my post-brain-surgery reconstruction of reality. It's like, lawyers don't really duke it out in court even metaphorically, they have a reputation with each other, emnities surprisingly, alliances unsurprisingly, they don't use all the arguments they could use.
Well it's based on fighting, I know that well, it's words-fighting. That's its origin, that's exactly what the fuck it is, you talk stupid so you hire an eloquent tongue-tier to say beautiful things for your case. Before the lawyer era--in the champion era--the client fought poorly (was weak), so he paid a strong fighter who would fight for him.
I am however qualified to say what it would be like today if we still had champions instead of attorneys. I would do the same thing if I both were a bad man and agreed to fight on behalf of others for pay. Dude pro-wrestling! Faces and heels! All the way! Then you don't get hurt, ever! All the champions pretend to fight tooth and nail but don't, you hurt him he hurts you back, so it's dance-fighting choreography shit. You keep the fight going if you're paid by the second, and mostly you don't truly want to win for the sake of person you're defending. For your fighting record yeah, not for your client. You might owe the opponent a favor, it was his turn last time. And there's a pecking order, you don't just take any fight against any fighter. There is power projection, linked to price.
Because of all the champions there can only be one champion and the all of the rest are champions who aren't the champion.
Since Disney is not facing legal threat, there is no requirement for legal argument. Only PR statements suffice. There is no need to say something legally valid.
From the corporate viewpoint contracts only matter if there is credible threat of enforcing the contract. If there is none, they can brush it off.
Shaming game tries to attack reputation, but big corporations like Disney have deals with them for decades and they know masses don't turn against them.
If the legal defense is as flimsy as it seems to me, then the only reason for this type of PR statement would be to demoralize others. To send a message that their actual legal defense doesn't even matter, because they'll win anyways. This seems like a pretty strong statement to make, so I'm trying to figure out where my misunderstanding lies.
I don't expect the cops to arrest Amazon when they fail to deliver what I ordered.
Fraud is a crime. Criminal copyright infringement is a crime.
If amazon were to take your money and not deliver, and it can be proven they did so intentionally, never intended to deliver, they would face criminal charges for fraud.
If Disney, as is alleged here, is "willfully and for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain"[0] using other people's works, that's criminal copyright infringement.
They say they have the right to exploit these works commercially through contracts, but at the same time say the contracts do not apply to them. So either the contracts do not apply, in which case they have no right to commercial exploitation and therefore commit criminal copyright infringement, or the contracts do apply and they are criminally defrauding the authors.
Point is, I’m not arguing with your legal argument but from a moral perspective, the law seems (in)conveniently bent towards supporting institutions and not people. If Amazon kept your money and didn’t deliver a product, then yes, they should be held criminally responsible.
Perhaps the most insidious part of what’s happening and the argument you make: it’s criminal when you or I do it but it’s “a civil matter” when a corporation does it!
So should I assume that when you eat at a restaurant, you leave without paying because the restaurant at some level consented to the relationship?
Or, perhaps even better, stop watching mass media lowest common denominator crap and read a good novel. Strongly recommend Paulo Baucalupi's Windup Girl, or Martha Wells' Murderbot Diaries. Or for something political and uplifting, Meachem's "The Soul of America".
That's not how Pay It Forward is supposed to work. =(
Since they're a global company and very litigious, this might prove useful to some lawyers.
The question was "why should", and might is merely why something does happen, not why it should happen.
Any lawyer/lawyer-adjacent people have any thoughts about the validity? It does feel pretty uncontroversial that Disney owns the book contents but is it obvious that the royalty payment scheme must transfer with that? But the opposite seems odd as well…
1: Acquire a license for ARM/x86/ISA and patents of your choice, at a license fee of 20,000$ / CPU-sized-die.
2: (Declare bankruptcy), sell the "asset" of being allowed to use the ISA, but not the "liability" of having to pay any fees.
In other words, it would make literally all contracts meaningless, since you're only ever one (shell) company restructuring away from keeping only the parts of the contract you want, and discarding any obligations.
But how much power does an individual have when signing a contract with a media giant? The contracts are probably "take it or leave it". You may not be able to afford a lawyer to review the contract in detail and if you do and they flag something, you cannot make Disney change the term.
And for real assets you keep a "security interest" that allows you take the proceeds of the asset sale.
I suppose my question wasn't very precise. There are lots of contracts for licenses and the like that state they are non-transferable. Imagine you did not put that in there. Is there some sort of contract law backstop to prevent this from happening then?
Surely the asset in question here is "the right to publish a work in exchange for paying royalties", no? The right to publish without paying anything can't be something Disney acquired, because Lucasfilm never had that right to begin with.
It's as absurd buying a company and saying you acquired the asset of the employee work contracts, but not the liability of having to pay them salaries. How can anyone say this stuff with a straight face?
I buy some milk from Albertson's. Am I now responsible for their corporate debt? I buy _all of the milk_ from Albertson's. Am I now responsible? I buy all the milk, the veggies, the building that holds them, the delivery trucks. Am I now responsible?
The point is that it isn't patently absurd in the same way that the opposite isn't patently absurd.
I would imagine that Lucas owned the books, even if somebody else wrote them. And there is a royalty agreement, of course. But there is a possible context-free explanation that is at least logically consistent.
The way the company buyout example works is that the company sells all their assets, then you have litigation/bankruptcy proceedings that use the money to make employees and owners as whole as possible. Employee work products are owned by the company, there isn't some unbreakable link there by default (beyond some natural rights about being able to say you are the author). But in that model, of course, if there are a lot of useful assets, a lot of money is then in the bank to pay out the employees!
If Lucasfilm ever owned the copyright to these books, they could grant themselves the right to publish without obligations. They didn't, so they never owned the copyrights, so Disney doesn't either.
After all, a contract to let somebody publish your book in exchange for royalties is basically a license agreement, right? The copyright owners granted Lucasfilm a license to publish as long as certain obligations were met, same as when you publish code under GPL. Disney's position is analogous to saying they acquired the right to use your GPL code, but not any of the obligations the GPL imposes. That's why it's absurd.
(I would expect the initial contract to give Lucas as much of the rights as would have been possible at the time)
Because it's impossible. Take a loan, acquire the money and not the debt, repeat. It's a mental bomb planted by corporate drones to melt your mind. Because if Chewbacca is not a wookie why is he living in Endor? It makes no sense.
Also, many of these authors are writing under existing franchises. (The kickoff incident is a bestselling author of Star Wars novels.) They couldn’t sell their work elsewhere even if they wanted to, because the franchise they wrote for is still owned by Disney and the organization that would buy that work would need to negotiate for some kind of licensing agreement.
cf, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraudulent_Conveyances_Act_157...
It has nothing whatsoever to do with promoting creativity, arts, or making sure artists can live off their work. It has everything to do with how much muscle somebody had in negotiations and lobbying.
If you have doubts, read "How to suceed in the music business" and weep. (Film is worse, and for books, just read the OP)
[0] And most other countries I'm aware of, to a different/lesser extent.
Anything that requires courts will favor the large corps that have the money to spend endlessly on lawyers.
Patents keep the new guys out of the game.
Say a big company steals a product from a startup, guess who cannot afford the legal battle? If threatened, the big guys claim that ten of their not-quite-related patents were infringed by startup, and counter-sue.
From first hand experience, the patent keeps ideas out of use (all patent lawyers recommend submarine patenting any new ideas instead of developing them), hurt small companies and inventors, and are huge bludgeon against anyone that the big cos want to hit.
[1] https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/online-laxity_us-puts-switzerla...
It's similar to all the BS about patents that focus on the little inventor.
I'm much more interested in
a) popular culture not being owned and monopolised by anyone, including the original author(s)
b) giant corporations abusing laws generally
Having said that, Cory Doctorow is usually right about most things. I just find it hard to get excited about George R Martin getting his copyright back so he can sell it again.
First off it's a little messed up to not care if people get paid for their work, second you say you're concerned with >giant corporations abusing laws generally
which is often the cause and in this case exactly the cause of the royalty paid workers not getting paid.
third, I often encounter variations of this attitude at HN which, considering that the mean wage of authors and writers https://www.bls.gov/ooh/media-and-communication/writers-and-... is $69,510 annually, and considering that many of the people on HN earn significantly more than that (I definitely do) seems especially gauche.
Now I don't know how much you earn per year, but if you are earning above that maybe it's messed up to think the people earning less than you should earn even less.
>I just find it hard to get excited about George R Martin getting his copyright back so he can sell it again.
argument by outlier isn't that great, but it should also be noted that writers and authors are more like entrepreneurs in how they create and get paid for creation, so maybe it is fair that some people who take risks earn more than others when those risks succeed.
Having a conversation about how that government intervention could be altered to make society better is something I'm here for. Discussing how it can be tilted more towards the people taxing the general population, and so directly fund the people that even this article thinks are the bad guys I'm less interested in.
Having said that, copyright termination is similar to what I propose to fix patents.
Any inventor should be able to re-auction their patent after 12-years to the highest bidder. It would immediately become clear that this would be writing a blank cheque and people would avoid using any patented work and we can move on with our lives in a more efficient post-patent era.
At the moment only a complex game of legal brinkmanship between corporations keeps this system stable.
And if that is not happening, then it means the author never held the copyright, but rather had a royalty that was based on some other mechanism. If the author did not have copyright, it means they must have been doing their work as a work for hire.
This does not change the fact that Disney is a bunch of scum bags.
So if Disney doesn't uphold the contract, doesn't that mean it wasn't a work for hire, and therefore the copyright belongs to the author?
Deceived they were, by Sauron/Disney.
At the very least why not become a reviewer, that way you can receive advanced copies and in return write a review to generate hype for the book?
Don't forget to also thank Diane Feinstein for her roles as a life-long Disney shill and a staunch defender of the unholy mess that is copyright law in defense of big media.
Consider this strange comment for a US Senator to make about a corporate CEO change:
https://www.feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-rele...
I said, "I show up on time, so I leave on time too."
I was the only person in the company who arrived before the clock, without fail, including the boss, including everybody. It was a weird thing, I got a ride and that meant I showed up early, saved time. So I just stood there waiting for the work to start in any capacity, for the second person to arrive. On standby. And I did in fact allow a little wage theft, don't even consider it in those terms, the standby and in addition the ten minutes before the shift started where I'd already be helping the business start its day, unlocking places and readying stuff, undeniably still work.
A little unpaid overtime before is different than after.
But when the shift ends, the boss might get an extra 30 seconds today, or 10 seconds less tomorrow, but there is no mercy. If the boss starts a fire to try to get me to stay I will call the fire department on my way home.
The clock is the boss's boss.
Maybe Florida could use that line as it annexes the Reddy Creek Improvement district into Orange County.
